Baltimore Diary

Sometimes It Is About the Barbecue

Homer: Look kids! I just got my party invitiations back from the printers.
Lisa: [reading the invitation] "Come to Homer's BBBQ. The extra B is for BYOBB."
Bart: What's that extra B for?
Homer: It's a typo.

—The Simpsons, "Lisa the Vegetarian" (10/15/95)

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A couple of nights ago, we were trying to figure out what, if anything, we were going to do for dinner tonight. Now, several weeks ago the neighbors brought home a half a cow they'd purchased from a farm somewhere north of here, possibly in Delaware. In among all that half-cow was a nice-sized brisket. We'd all been pretty hot to put that brisket on the smoker, so we decided that today would be an ideal day. The three of us, plus the four of them (the baby doesn't count when you're calculating supper), means that everyone would be pretty well-fed on this thing.

Well. Somewhere between Friday and today, the event started to balloon into something else again. This, by the way, is through no fault of our own. S & B invited a bunch of friends and family along. I didn't mind it as such, but it was kind of funny to see plans for seven adults turn into 20 in the space of about 36 hours.

I put together a dry rub (my brother's recipe; I fully admit it) and started the brisket on the smoker shortly after noon (counting on a 4:00ish serving time). Around 2:00 I put some pork ribs in the oven. At 3:15 I put some Italian sausage on my Binford 16000 grill, and about four pounds of peppers & onions, along with some olive oil, in a wok on the grill's side burner.

Is there a better smell in the world than peppers and onions just starting to cook? Probably, but not when you're in the moment.

3:30: Ribs come out of the oven. By 3:45 they're on the grill and drenched lovingly basted with barbecue sauce. The sausages are tossed into the wok. The brisket comes out of the smoker and is sliced up. It's amazing. By 4:00 everything on my side of the fence is done. Just for kicks I've also skewered some shrimp I found in the freezer and stuck that on the grill with a little BBQ sauce as well. I didn't really like the way the shrimp came out but everyone liked it, so what do I know.

S, on the other side, put corn on the cob on her grill, along with the requisite burgers & dogs, and a last-minute addition of kielbasa. She also made cole slaw, potato salad and a bowtie pasta/shrimp salad. And baked beans.

This all feels like a warmup for my annual pig roast, does it not?

It's Not Just About the Barbecue Thing

Sam Weinberg: Why do you like them so much?
Jo Galloway: Because they stand on a wall. And they say, "Nothing's gonna hurt you tonight. Not on my watch."

—A Few Good Men (1992)

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A sonnet that Garrison Keillor wrote in 2004 and read during the show on Friday:

We're here to honor those who went to war
Who did not wish to die, but did die, grievously,
In eighteen sixty-one and in two-thousand four
Though they were peaceable as you or me.
Young and innocent, they knew nothing of horror---
Singers and athletes, and all in all well-bred.
Their sergeants, mercifully, made them into warriors,
And at the end, they were moving straight ahead.
As we look at these headstones, row on row on row,
Let us see them as they were, laughing and joking,
On that bright irreverent morning long ago.
And once more, let our hearts be broken.
God have mercy on them for their heroic gift.
May we live the good lives they would have lived.

Just a simple "Thanks" to those who have stood, and who continue to stand on that wall.

The Jinx Strikes Again

[In the hospital waiting area]
Father Dougal McGuire: Who would have thought being hit by lightning would land you in hospital?
Father Ted Crilly: What? What are you talking about? Of course it can land you in hospital.
Father Dougal: Well it's not usually serious, is it, Ted? I mean, I was hit by lightning a few times and I never had to go to hospital.
Father Ted: Yes Dougal, but you're different from most people. All that happened to you was that balloons kept sticking to you.

—Father Ted, "Entertaining Father Stone" (4/28/95)

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It's getting to be a family tradition, one which I first chronicled here. I go to Florida, someone in my family goes to the hospital.

On Sunday, my brother hosted Easter dinner with the family. Nineteen invited guests showed up, along with three (welcome) surprises. Literally minutes before dinner, my uncle (whom I hadn't seen in years) was on the patio petting the cat, when the cat suddenly turned and bit him. Odd behavior for that cat to say the least. My uncle started washing it out at the sink, someone got the peroxide, etc., but my aunt overrode all this, noting that he's diabetic and has a heart condition for which he takes Coumadin, and besides, it was kind of nasty-looking anyway. So, off to the Emergency Room. Dinner was a little maudlin, to say the least, but we had a pleasant time nonetheless. By the time they got back (and they were relatively fast), several people had departed and it was easier to engage in a little more chitchat with everyone. Basically he's okay, keep it clean and call the doctor if he starts rolling around in the catnip. Heh.

Of course, the second part of this is the visit from Animal Control, which happened yesterday. They took a look at the cat, said to keep him indoors for 45 days, and they may come at irregular intervals to look again.

The curse continues!

Moving On

Cliff Clavin: Even though I chipped in for the beer with the guys, I also got you a special little gift.
Norm Peterson: Oh yeah. What's that?
Cliff Clavin: Well, I did some research on the historical significance of birthdays - uncovered a lot of interesting facts, and, uh... I'm not going to share them with you. Happy birthday, big guy!

—Cheers, "Where Have All the Floorboards Gone?" (11/7/91)

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Aaannnnd, just like that, I move into the next demographic. Yow.

Here's my present to myself:

I didn't do quite as well as I'd hoped, largely because I didn't much break my habit of reading nonfiction. But I did get through a couple of novels, and that's all that counts.

Plus, it's my birthday. Leave me alone.

Lowered Expectations

Chicolini: Monday we watch-a Firefly's house, but he no come he wasn't home. Tuesday we go to the ball game, but he fool us: he no show up. Wednesday HE go to the ball game, but we fool HIM, WE no show up. Thursday it was a double-header nobody show up. Friday it rained all day, there was no ball game, so we stayed home, we listen to it over the radio.

—Duck Soup (1933)
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OK, this is my first real post of the New Year. So, Happy New Year!

(Confidential to ACW: I may be a bitch, but at least I can spell "predictions." Heh.)

Tomorrow I return to work after the holiday break. One of my goals this past week was to generally keep my ambitions relatively low as far as getting stuff done. So many times before a school break, I say "This is the week I'm going to..." and that's the top of a huge list, of which only a couple of the items may or may not get done. This time around, I had a relatively small list of things and if they happened, great. If they didn't, oh well. And as it happened, more stuff got done that way. The only project that remains to be finished is the re-organizing of all my bills and stuff. I'm about two-thirds of the way through with that, and as I type this I'm completely surrounded by unsorted paperwork. But that's OK; it'll get finished tomorrow evening.

So tomorrow, first thing in the morning, I have to call my credit card company and work out getting a cash advance so that my car's deposit check doesn't bounce, plus I want to hit the local bank branch to see if they can do me any better on the car loan. If that works out, I'll have to get in touch with Carmax. If it doesn't, I may still have to get in touch with them to straighten out the deposit thing.

First day back after ten days and I'll be late for work. Life is truly amazing sometimes.

NaJuReMoNoMo update: I've started a re-read of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, starting with Red Mars. It's a hard science fiction novel with a lot of personality intrigue. Not dry at all, and in my head it's better than his more recent global warming series. After Red Mars I may turn to something a little more "classic," such as Dickens or Twain, just to expand my mind a bit.

$20 vacation

Carl Evello: What does matter is that your work has been interrupted, your car wrecked, your life has been ruffled, to put it mildly. If you had not stopped to pick up Christina, not any of these things would have happened. So let's pretend you did not pick her up.

—Kiss Me Deadly (1955)
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You know, there are just some times when you have to walk away from certain parts of your life for awhile. This is why I took a three-week break from writing here.

Of course, since I'm one of the schmucks who doesn't have a free blogging service, I still get to pay for the domain, the redirect page and the Typepad fee, so either I was going to quit altogether or I was going to come back. Sucks to be you that I came back.

On the bright side, these last few weeks would have been little more than complaining. The short version is that my car did indeed break down for good, so we've been working through the logistics of using one car (with a little borrowed-vehicle action here and there) until we can put a few bucks in the bank, because...

...GF is finally back to work, following her TWO surgical procedures. The bad news is that she'd burned up all her sick days to a much greater extent than she thought she had. So her most recent paycheck (before the break), instead of being short by about two days' worth of pay, wound up being six dollars and change. Thank goodness we'd started putting some money into a savings account, but that's nearly gone now. Her last couple of weeks' pay will be about half of what it should be, since she's been working half-days. In addition to that financial hit...

...the renters on the Morrell Park house have decided to stop paying rent. (Yeah, I know what some of you told me. You were right, OK? Now shut up.) So I've been forced to go the eviction route again. Off to court, where they didn't show, and today I have to call the Sheriff's office to schedule the actual eviction, assuming they don't bail out of the house before that. I did get to use their security deposit, so that partially made up for the lost income from GF. However, we'll have to do some deep cleaning on the house to get it in shape for the next person to come in (you know, the one with actual references and stuff), so there won't be any January income from it either. And, of course, all this financial hit means that...

...I didn't get to visit my family for the holiday. So I've spent two consecutive Christmas Days in Baltimore, along with what's going to be my second New Year's Eve. GF's family was very nice and gracious and welcoming and stuff, but face it, it's not the same thing at all. Plus, it didn't help with my mother going the "this may be the last time you see your grandmother alive" routine. Which may be true, but that's not really the best route to go when you've got to watch nearly every dime for the next several weeks.

Anyway.

I'm back, and with a little luck I'll have stuff a little less whiny next time around. But don't count on it.

A Little Grinchy

Rachel Phelps: [As "Wild Thing" starts to play and the crowd reacts] I hate this fucking song.

—Major League (1989)
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Now that Thanksgiving is over and we're moving into high gear on Christmas, of course it means that we're going to be hearing a lot of Christmas music.

What that means is that we'll hear about nineteen million permutations of about twenty different songs. The fact is, when you put on the "All Christmas All the Time" radio station (and there's at least one in every town; some of them started with that format weeks ago), the song catalogue just isn't that deep.

Many years ago, there was an AM station in New York City, WNEW-AM. They stood at 1130 on your dial and their format was old standards. It wasn't the "Music of Your Life", which was beamed by satellite to all the affiliates; they had DJs who programmed the shows and you got a lot of the Big Band sound, with Jazz vocalists and American standards, that sort of thing. (In fact, WNEW was the station that invented the DJ.) And every day at noon, the DJ, a fellow named William B. Williams, who had a show called "The Make-Believe Ballroom", would play the song Stardust.

Every day. Without repeating a recording unless he felt like it. For years.

This is what it's like listening to an All-Christmas station. The same few songs by all kinds of different artists. But there are a few songs that just plain irritate me:

• The Chipmunks Christmas song is one of the worst offenders. This song just makes my teeth hurt, and its popularity, which goes back to before I was born, is inexplicable. It's basically a one-joke novelty song, and the same joke gets repeated later on, in case you didn't catch the hilarity the first time around. We get it, Dave: Alvin doesn't pay attention. Give the little rodent some Ritalin and be done with it, already. The only bright note to all this is that nobody bothers to cover it because A) nobody is going to do the Chipmunk schtick, and B) there's really only one verse to the song without the schtick. Although that didn't stop Eurythmics from cutting "Sweet Dreams", did it?

   

• "My Favorite Things", the song from The Sound of Music, somehow turned into a Christmas song when this 1965 album by The Supremes came out (this is the CD cover, hence the "bonus tracks"). It's not a bad rendition of the song; in fact many of the tracks on this album are pretty good. But then again, all of the other songs on the album are Christmas songs. Not so much this one. And it might not be so bad if they stuck to the Supremes' rendition, but no. Other artists are starting to creep into the Christmas pantheon of "My Favorite Things." Just step away from the Rodgers & Hammerstein, please. And remember where you heard it first.

     

Damn right.

 









 

• Speaking of music that's been shoehorned into Christmas, someone's taken Pachelbel's Canon in D and added a children's choir with some Christmas lyrics to it. So you get the Canon plus the kids, then the Canon by itself, then the Canon and the kids again. None of which gets around the fact that it wasn't a Christmas song in the first place, so just cut it out. If you want to do something new, then do something new. If you want to re-do an existing Christmas song, nobody's stopping you. But don't do bogus mashups like this. Not on my watch, boy.

• Before you jump too ugly on me about "Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer", let me start by saying that I rather like this song. What I object to is the specific recording that we hear over and over again. When the song first started to break, in 1982, it was on a 45-rpm record, on a label called "Oink". By 1984 it was a nationwide novelty hit and CBS signed Elmo & Patsy Shropshire (that's their last name; don't say you don't learn stuff here) to a contract, and they re-recorded the song that year. The 1982 recording, to my ear, was MUCH funnier, because it was done in such a deadpan style. They basically trusted you to get the joke. The 1984 CBS recording, which is what we are now "treated" to, is a much "wackier" recording, where Elmo will punch up certain lines (note the heavy emphasis on the "You can say" part of the chorus and the overpronunciation of "incriminating Claus marks"), which is the verbal equivalent of an elbow to the ribs. The hell of it is, I had a copy of the Oink 45 and I can't find it.
• 

  I'm sure everyone and his brother has seen this video, which is a set of about 16,000 Christmas lights synchronized to "Wizards of Winter" by the Trans-Siberian Orchestra. I don't actually have much problem with this one either, although I'll mention that I heard it today on the radio and it's not as cool a tune without seeing the synchronized lights at the same time. They really complement each other well. 

And here's where I borrow a page from Yellojkt's playbook and get into some Blatant Comment Whoring^TM: Agree? Disagree? Anything you'd like to see banished?

Planning Ahead

C.J. Cregg: Oh, boy, I like it when "In Style" magazine is issued press credentials. "Mirabella" wanted to know what wine is served with the fish course. So it's a good thing I went to school for 22 years.
Josh Lyman: What wine are we—
C.J. Cregg: It's wine, you'll drink it.

—The West Wing, "The State Dinner" (11/10/99)

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GF and I have already begun planning our annual holiday party. With a bigger house and a more open layout, we can afford to open up the guest list a little bit. We can also lay out the whole thing a little differently.

The old place, the house I'm now renting out, had a "railroad" style layout. This means that there was one wall that was common to every room in the house, and walls that didn't go all the way across would separate one room from the next. So you had living room, then the stairs to the second floor, then the dining room, then a wall and then the kitchen. And it was a straight shot from the front door to the back. (Bad feng shui, that.) So when people wanted to pass from one room to the next, there were bottlenecks that happened. The kitchen was also very much a working space, so we couldn't really entertain in there. So already our space was cut by a third. 

The other thing that gets to me is that I tend to spend too much time shuttling food back and forth and not nearly enough time schmoozing with the guests, so in addition to the guest list we need to work on the menu, so the food is a little more low-maintenance. I don't want to go entirely the cheese-and-crackers route, but I don't want to do a lot of stuff that will require intense use of utensils. Any suggestions in this arena will be more than welcome.

In addition to the food, I'm thinking that the beverage list is going to change as well. There will be more beer and wine drinkers than previously, methinks, so I'm going to have to figure out a way of putting a cooler in the room without making it look like there's a bigass cooler in the room, ya know? The galvanized tubs look neat and all, but I'm thinking that they'll tend to sweat all over whatever they're sitting on, plus I'm not sure they hold as much as you think they do. So...pondering that one too. 

Al Roker/Groundhog, Po-Tay-Toe/Po-Tah-Toe

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Phil: What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered?
Ralph: That about sums it up for me.

—Groundhog Day (1993)

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You know how people who are born close to Christmas are always in danger of getting ripped off because they get "combination" presents? Yeah, that's my predicament. Except I'm always getting those "combination" birthday/Groundhog presents. Heh. 

I'll say this, though: my birthday is on Monday and what better present could I get than a prediction of early spring from both Punxsutawney Phil and Staten Island Chuck? (Chuck isn't nearly as famous, of course, but he does appeal to the New Yorker in me.)

Just for the giggles, I went to msnbc.com this morning to see if there was any information there. Nothing. Then I figured, well, it's "Today Show" kind of stuff so I went there. Nothing. So I went over to Wikipedia. Of course, that site was updated. They're quick over there, I tell you what.

Where did Groundhog Day come from? Today is the traditional date of Candlemas, the Catholic holiday that celebrates the purification of Mary and the presentation of Jesus in the temple. (In Roman Catholicism, the purification part has been de-emphasized.) It's called "Candlemas" because it's also traditionally the day that beeswax candles (gotta be beeswax, yo) are blessed for the year. On the modern calendar it falls on the 15th.

What does Candlemas have to do with groundhogs? I'm glad you asked. In Britain, tradition holds that good weather on Candlemas means bad winter weather later on. This is also about the time of year that most hibernating animals will wake up and decide whether or not to stay awake. If they go back into the den, then spring must still be a ways off. The groundhog aspect of this whole bit of folklore appears to have come out of Germany. Historically, all of this stuff goes back to the fifth century, although Groundhog Day is first mentioned in 1841, but it's mentioned as a tradition at that point, so it must go back further.

And now you know. </pedant>

Hypothetically Speaking

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Tony Robbins: Hal, don't you think you're being a bit shallow here in the way you look at women?
Hal: Well, no! You know, I'd like her to be into culture and shit, too.
Tony Robbins: Ok Hal, hypothetical situation; Which do you prefer, a girlfriend missing one breast or half a brain?
Hal: Hmmm, toughie. What about the remaining breast? Is it big?

—Shallow Hal (2001)
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Other people exist. Other people have lives. And homes. And families, and jobs, and significant others, and friends and god knows whatever else that goes with all that. But in so many arenas, this stuff remains largely hypothetical, sometimes forever.

So we build up these fantasy lives for the people we work with, or perhaps the people whose blogs we read. As small details come in, they help to paint the picture in your brain. And usually that's all you get.

Sometimes you get a pretty complete picture: Everyone knows what Snay's apartment looks like because he's posted photos a million times, especially after he scams someone into cleaning it for him. And see? I know that much about him: he doesn't often do it himself, at least not according to his blog.

With me, on the other hand, if you dig deeply enough you know what my dogs, my sofa, the girls and my backyard look like. Oh, and my mother. I did post a picture of her once. But pretty much everything else you have to build in your head.

And then, once in awhile, a co-worker will have a party and invite you over. And now you're completely flummoxed because the whole story you've written in your head has become undone and has to be corrected.

This whole thing occurred to me awhile back, following my own Christmas party. For a lot of people, my home is no longer hypothetical. But theirs is still, to me. There's an imbalance of information going on here. I need to get invited to more stuff, dammit.